The death of the [modified] developer – by Forrest Brazeal

I think that AI has killed, or is about to kill, pretty much every single modifier we want to put in front of the word “developer.”“.NET developer”? Meaningless. Copilot, Cursor, etc can get anyone conversant enough with .NET to be productive in an afternoon … as long as you’ve done enough other programming that you know what to prompt. (Sorry, “juniors”.)“Senior .NET developer”? It’s an oxymoron. If you’re senior now, your identity can’t just be “I write .NET”. AI is writing most of the actual .NET code. You have to be able to supervise and tweak a much broader set of technologies to be worth “senior” money.

For awhile I thought the only useful modifier AI has left us with is “fullstack”. For years now we’ve all been complaining about these “fullstack developer” job postings that seem to demand half a dozen skillsets in one: front end, back end, cloud, data, DevOps…That isn’t ridiculous anymore. You pretty much have to make an impact across the full stack now because “I’m heads down on front end code” has become Claude Sonnet’s job. The AI world is a generalist’s world. Go big or go home, literally.

Source: The death of the [modified] developer – by Forrest Brazeal